Clinton’s team throwing him under Obama’s bus?

posted at 11:51 am on June 7, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Maybe it was Charles Krauthammer’s snide dig about Bill Clinton being a “double agent” for the Mitt Romney campaign, or perhaps the angry reaction from the former President’s allies on the Left. Whatever prompted it, Clinton’s own team has gone into overdrive to push him under Barack Obama’s bus, hoping to convince the media to forget what Clinton has said over the past week about the economy and Romney’s “sterling business career” at Bain Capital. Politico reports that they’re even hinting that Clinton might be too old to take too seriously:

In the past, these kinds of complaints have often prompted Clinton lieutenants to kindly suggest that the Obama team can go to hell: a former president can, should and will say what he wants.

This time was different: Clinton’s team was as aghast as Obama’s at how the boss had wandered blithely into remarks that left even sympathetic listeners wondering what exactly he was getting at. He also gave gleeful Republicans an opening to skewer Obama with a popular Democrat’s own words.

Clinton, in a ritual that would be familiar to anyone who has worked for him during the past 20 years, protested that his words were being wrested from context and blamed a manipulative news media for stirring up trouble to satisfy its own lust for chaos and conflict.

But his own team, and eventually Clinton himself, agreed there was no choice but to issue embarrassing what-the-former-president-meant-to-say clarifications, which were crafted in close consultation with senior Obama aides at the White House and campaign headquarters in Chicago, according to people involved in the negotiations.

They offered Politico this explanation:

Clinton, say associates, while mentally sharp, is older and a step off his political game, less attuned to the need for clarity and message-discipline during interviews.

“He’s 65 years old,” said one adviser, explaining how Clinton in a CNBC interview managed to say that the economy was in recession when it is not.

Wow. Do politicians become liabilities at 65 years of age now? If so, someone had better check Hillary’s expiration date, because she’ll be turning 65 just a few days before the 2012 election.

Team Obama must be exerting a whole lot of pressure to get a full recantation from Clinton and his camp, mainly for speaking the truth. Most people in the US do feel that we are in a recession, or at least a recessionary environment, and Mitt Romney did have a sterling business career at Bain Capital. The problem for Obama is that his campaign can’t handle those truths, literally, as they have to pretend that the economy is rosy and that Romney is an eeeeeeevil vampire capitalist in order to win, rather than defend their own record and agenda as Clinton suggested last week. Maybe they should be listening to the wisdom of their elders, rather than push his aides into suggesting that Clinton’s starting to get a little demented from age.

Instead, they sent Debbie Wasserman Schultz onto CNN’s Piers Morganto argue that Romney doesn’t have a sterling business career, and attack Clinton obliquely:

Host Piers Morgan reminded the DNC chairwoman of Clinton’s appearance on his program last week with fill-in host Harvey Weinstein in which he praised Obama’s opponent by defending his “sterling” business career. But according to Wasserman Schultz, that was an incorrect statement.

“No, I don’t agree with President Clinton on that point,” she said. “In fact, Mitt Romney is basing his entire candidacy on his experience in the private sector. And the only application that we have in government to — of Mitt Romney’s sterling private sector experience is when he was governor of Massachusetts, in which he brought Massachusetts from being 36th to 47th out of 50 in job creation.”

Wasserman Schultz went on to speak on Clinton’s behalf saying that he was “100 percent behind Obama,” despite interpretations of those remarks that suggest otherwise.

I’m pretty sure that Clinton is sincere in backing Obama, too — I don’t buy the idea that he’s hoping to install a Republican President to make it easier for Hillary in 2016. Besides, at 69, Clinton’s own team might think she’d be too old.

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Anything Clinton, then the best one to decipher it is always Dick Morris.

Yesterday on Hannity(radio) Morris gave a list of reasons:

1) Clinton wants to be the only Dem Pres to be reelected in the past 30 years.
2) Clinton is still angry about being called a racist by the Obamas during the primary. He defines himself as a non-racist from Arkansas and takes great pride in that. The race card made him furious and he can’t control himself when it comes to his anger against Obama.
3) He wants Obama gone for Hillary. He wants Hillary to win so he can say he was so great that he even got his wife elected.

I think there were a couple more as well.

Also, he can use the “I was giving cover to Obama to cave on this issue” excuse to the Dems. He also goes out and praises Obama from time to time to stay in the good graces of the Dem voters for Hillary. He wants Obama out of there.

How quickly the young forget wisdom…and how readily the old are prepared to hand it to them served cold.

Barack Obama’s bus just might find the Clinton ego a bit too large to go over. A Clinton insulted is one set on a new course of action against you… Bill and Hill have been on the inside just long enough to know the weaknesses of the Obama camp in detail.

If you think him old an enfeebled by age, just watch out for what comes next.

Team Obama is unravelling! This is great popcorn viewing! The Dems are really in a mess, almost a free fall, and Obama and his outstanding commitment only to himself, have them heading for the tall grass! Obama is going to have an appalling effect on down ticket races. As for coattails, he has Speedos on!

I would never have guessed that Romney/RNC would be the beneficiaries of the implosion we are witnessing by the Obama Campaign/DNC. The last month has been rather unbeleivable! It brings to mind, ” you can run, but you can’t hide!” Too bad for Bill, but you reap what you sow!

Liberals really do not like the elderly too much, as anyone who has spent some time politically on the Internet can attest. One of their favorite attacks on Conservatives is “I hope you die soon you old Republican person”.

If you were Bill Clinton and wanted to weed out the Obama plants in your organization, just how would you do it?

Perhaps do some off-hand knifing in the back of Obama? Burnish the reputation of his competitor? All while glad-handing and being ever so bright and cheerful about Obama’s chances, of course.

Lost a step?

Nope.

He is inside their OODA loop and about to start cleaning house of the unreliables and those who have been paid off to help Obama. Whoever you are in the Clinton camp, the moment you say a bad word about Bill on what he says, your days as a FOB are numbered.

Bill Clinton is 65 years young, sharp as a tack, and knows exactly what he is doing. He’ll make ambiguous remarks that appear contrary to the Obama message that will show up on prime time; the “corrections” issued by his office get buried. Notice that not one of the Clinton “aides” speaking to Politico will go on the record? It’s because the Clinton “aides” are actually Obama aides protecting their boss, low level DNC hacks protecting the brand, or genuine 2nd tier Clinton people perpetuating the CYA spin. The real Clintonistas, the A-team, like Begala, Carville, and Morris (Clintonista apostate wing), are out there essentially doing the same thing.

Honestly, I would have expected all the back room sniping between the Clinton and O’bama (Del Dolemonte TM) camps to leak to the public around December, shortly after Urkel gets his doors blown off in the general.

Oh this line of attack on Bill Clinton will help with two groups…Senior Citizens, they will just love this. The Bill Clinton wing of the Democrat party…Maybe, just maybe attacking these two groups is not such a good idea.

It seems the Obama folks can not see anything beyond the end of today’s news cycle.

It would seem the comments of Mr. Clinton have been resonating with the public, especially the independents.

Clinton’s just trying to look visibly like he’s a rat escaping a sinking ship with graces and aplomb.

He may be a sexual predator, but he’s no idiot, unlike Obama. Clinton probably expects Obama to lose to the right, independents, and a portion of the liberal base, and when Obama is repudiated, Clinton is going to look like a soothsayer, putting him back into the spotlight. He, and by proxy Hillary, might become the de facto faces of the adult contingent of the Democratic party, while Obama and the far leftists (Reid, Pelosi, Schumer) become black sheep within the party structure for their failure.

This has Valarie Jarrett’s finger prints all over it. Is she that drunk on power? Hillary Clinton Bill’s wife is the Secretary of State, no one in the Obama administration is paying attention to the optics? They alienated PUMAS back in 2008, I am sure this new insult is going to endear PUMAS to the Obama reelection campaign/

Scroll down the page. I highly recommend everyone read it. The BEA is deliberately fudging the deflators AND they are taking as long as 40 months to get the GDP values “revised” to anything close to accurate.

Rush seems to think Clinton’s words may be part of Obama strategery. I don’t think the blamer or his crew are smart enough for that.

The damage from the Clinton statements is already done. No amount of defamation of Bill Clinton is going to alter the fact that most of the American people recognize the truth when they hear it.

Obama has been reliant on the advise and council of Bill Clinton throughout his presidency. Its been no secret that Obama has consulted him regularly over the course of the last 3 1/2 years. Obama has even tried to use the background presence of Bill Clinton to bolster his own gravitas on several issues. As a matter of fact, I recall an incident wherein Obama chose to forgo addressing the American people at a press conference and had Bill Clinton stand in for him so that the could go enjoy a Christmas party with his wife and daughters. I also recall that the reporters present seemed to relax and were happy to speak with the former president, several remarking that it ‘felt like old times’.

Trying to diminish the image of Bill Clinton in such a transparent and shabby way is not going to sit well with MANY Democrats. Bill and Hillary Clinton are both well regarded and highly esteemed by a great many Democrats, many liberals and progressives among them. This may well backfire in Obama’s face.

Nancy Pelosi has been openly pushing a “Hillary in 2016″ campaign. It has been long assumed in Democratic circles that Hillary Clinton would be the odds on favorite for the nomination in 2016 and many wish that she had challenged Obama for 2012. A lot of Hillary’s appeal is based on the remembrance of Bill Clinton’s presidency and the robust economy that accompanied it. Bill and Hillary Clinton actually said at the time that with them in the White House the US had a ‘team’ in the presidency.

I don’t think, as they ingest this latest ploy by the Obama team, that the Democratic base is going to like Clinton, a former two term president (the ONLY Democrat elected to the presidency since Dwight D. Eisenhower wrested the presidency from the Democrats in the mid 50’s) being publicly humiliated by the Obama campaign.

I think Bill Clinton understands this and has calculated the entire episode. He’s a master of the political dance.

If anything, I think Clinton sees the destruction Obama is wreaking on the Democratic Party, and he’s casting around for a way to save it. Nobody was ever better at politics than Bill Clinton, and the attempts to throw him under the bus must infuriate him.

“Politico reports that they’re even hinting that Clinton might be too old to take too seriously.”

Wow! That must be sitting really well with Joe Biden, who has been making those funny duck noises about taking a run in 2016!

Joe will be 70 this November 20th, when he is on the ballot for “Veep” and a heartbeat away . . . and, therefore, he’ll be 74 years old by November of 2016! Gosh, that must make him a complete idiot by this Obama team sort of reasoning.

Oh, wait . . .

But seriously, the Obama political team is just completely out of control, even as amongst themselves.

Talk about finding ways to irritate what have frequently been natural Democrat constituencies — especially considering one like the burgeoning group of “65 and over” voters, affectionately known as the “boomer bump” because of those who have begun steadily moving into senior town!!

I do suspect that there may be a method to all this seeming madness on Slick Willie’s part. If the reason really is to somehow help the Obamao campaign, the M.O. escapes me, but I do like the thought above, from someone, about exposing Obamaphiles on the Clinton team. They should be “gone” yesterday already. As far as Clinton realizing how the Obama “fairytale” is bringing down the whole party, that’s got to be fact.

Clinton, say associates, while mentally sharp, is older and a step off his political game, less attuned to the need for clarity and message-discipline during interviews.

I don’t believe that for a second. He says exactly what he wants to say. And if someone else wants to make excuses for him, he just grins and shuffles as needed.

There isn’t a bus big enough for Obama to throw Clinton under. Obama’s the pawn in this picture, a tool of the left. You know he has absolutely no idea that he’s a pawn; I don’t believe he could wrap his fat head around that idea.

Back in the ’90s, many people called CNN the “Clinton News Network” because it was so obviously partial to the Democratic President from Arkansas.

Wolf Blitzer perfectly exemplified why this was the case Thursday when in an interview with former President Bill Clinton, he shamefully allowed his guest to absurdly claim that prior to Tuesday’s controversial interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, he thought the Bush tax cuts expired before Election Day

-snip-

As Clinton had an extensive, closed-door discussion with Obama about this two-year extension, and briefed the press about it, it’s patently absurd of him eighteen months later to claim he didn’t know when an agreement he was privy to and sold the nation on actually ended.

Not to mention the almost metaphysical certitude that no tax legislation would ever end in the middle of a calendar year. Exactly how would payroll preparers, bookkeepers, and accountants deal with such a situation?

Yet Blitzer completely ignored all the inherent flaws in the position Clinton was taking, and allowed him to basically say whatever he wanted to remedy the harm he had done to the Obama campaign two days prior regardless of its total absurdity.

2) Clinton is still angry about being called a racist by the Obamas during the primary. He defines himself as a non-racist from Arkansas and takes great pride in that. The race card made him furious and he can’t control himself when it comes to his anger against Obama.

jeffn21 on June 7, 2012 at 12:37 PM

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I’ll bet this one… My guess is that when they hit Billy Bob with the race card there was more cursing in the Clinton camp than that time a blue dress proved Bill to be The Liar and Perv in Chief.
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I take no glee in watching Clinton sniping at Obama. I didn’t like Clinton, don’t care for Obama, and wish they would both just go away. They have both lowered the Presidency to such a silly, tin toy. For all my disagreements with Bush, at least he was The President.

“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth: lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, and he turn his wrath away.” Proverbs 24:17

The media seems to forget that Hillary was bought off with the Sec. of State job and Bill is still upset that he is not back in the White House and away from the many cameras and microphones there. He is also upset that the Clinton machine had a monkey wrench thrown into the gears by the Obama team. Just listen to the politicians talk, they are all mostly lawyers and lawyers will scream and holler at each other in court and then go out for a beer afterwards. Same thing with the fraternity there in DC.